Smooth Scrubbing video in Android

Question

I am trying to achieve smooth video scrubbing with Android VideoView. The seekTo method of MediaPlayer is not doing exactly what i want. It does not exactly seek to millisecond i passed in it, it actually plays from/jumps to the nearest position, not the exact I seeked to. Also the frames are showing with a large gaps. Not the exact frame for millisecond.

I came on searching around and found that SEEK_CLOSEST_SYNC can only seek to the nearest sync frame not the EXACT. It depends on the way the video was generated. How can i achieve the smooth scrubbing and seek to exact position Even video is paused or playing. Is it possible through Android VideoView or MediaPlayer class or should i change the approach?

Answer 1

This is not a straight forward question to answer. I spent a month researching and implementing it myself.

The only way this can be achieved is using MediaCodec.

You can look at this project that does exact scrubbing using MediaCodec. The only issue I had with that project is that it takes time to load the buffer and display it on the surface, about 0.5 seconds.

You can also have a look at Grafica, especially the MoviePlayer class. Another source is the BigFlake website.

What I ended up doing is creating my own implementation using MediaCodec as none of them provided me exactly what I was looking for, as I was building a golf analyzer, I needed (real-time) precise (frame-per-frame) scrubbing of the video.

You can also look at a question I asked that is similar to this, where I added a lot of info on how I achieved this. Though this question is more about playing a video frame-per-frame, I think there is valuable info in it.